The Barrelfish OS for Hetergeneous Multicore Systems

The Barrelfish OS is a new open-source operating system for
heterogeneous multicore systems being developed at ETH Zurich, in conjunction with Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

This talk will say why we think we can write a new OS, and why we think we should. Hand-in-hand with increasing hardware parallelism is increasing hardware diversity, even within a single machine. Furthermore, the drive towards multicore programmability is beginning
to result in interesting language and runtime features whose I/O and scheduling requirements may not be well served by existing OS structure.

Barrelfish seeks to meet these challenges by viewing a multicore machine more as a networked system than as a single, monolithic computer, and applying results from distributed computing to scaling a single OS instance across many heterogeneous cores. We also apply knowledge representation techniques to allow the OS and applications to reason about the richness of the hardware at runtime, in the interests of continuous performance optimization. I'll talk about how these approaches lead to a novel way of structuring an OS, and the current status and future directions of the system.
ork).ABSTRACT:
The Barrelfish OS is a new open-source operating system for
heterogeneous multicore systems being developed at ETH Zurich, in
conjunction with Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
This talk will say why we think we can write a new OS, and why we
think we should. Hand-in-hand with increasing hardware parallelism is
increasing hardware diversity, even within a single machine.
Furthermore, the drive towards multicore programmability is beginning
to result in interesting language and runtime features whose I/O and
scheduling requirements may not be well served by existing OS
structure.
Barrelfish seeks to meet these challenges by viewing a multicore machine more as a networked system than as a single, monolithic computer, and applying results from distributed computing to scaling a single OS instance across many heterogeneous cores. We also apply
knowledge representation techniques to allow the OS and applications
to reason about the richness of the hardware at runtime, in the interests of continuous performance optimization. I'll talk about how these approaches lead to a novel way of structuring an OS, and the current status and future directions of the system.